Page 28 of Patch

Three-seventeen on the clock.

Forty-nine minus twenty-eight is twenty-one. I’d run it in the truck. I’d run it at the gate. I ran it again lying on top of the covers with my boots off and my knee talking about the cold front coming in.

At sixty I’d have a woman of thirty-nine.

At sixty-eight, forty-seven.

At seventy-six, if I get there, she’d be fifty-five and still working. I’d be a man she had to help out of the chair.

That’s what the numbers do if you run them forward, and they don’t give a damn how you feel about it.

Fox offered me a house years back. I told him to give it to Rocket, who had a kid coming. He offered again a while after that, and I told him to give it to Cotton.

What I said both times was that a room over the common room has one door and I can hear the gate from it. That was true both times.

What I didn’t say is that a house is a thing you come home to. A man who comes home stops standing at the gate. I hadn’t worked out yet what I’d be if I stopped standing at the gate, so I kept the room, and the room kept me where I could hear everything.

Forty-nine years old with one door and no furniture I’d chosen, lying awake over a woman who owns a car, a credential, and a grandmother.

So I ran them the other way once and got an eight-year-old somewhere in this state playing with whatever eight-year-olds play with, on a night I was standing in the lot at County Medical with another man’s blood dried under my nails and Dread saying six words to me that I’ve been dodging ever since.

You’ve got the hands for it.

I didn’t. That was the finding. Twenty-nine years old, a shop rag, a roll of duct tape, ninety miles an hour with one palm flat on a brother’s chest, and the man lived. I decided in a parking lot that he lived because of luck and that luck isn’t a Goddamn qualification.

Twenty years that held up. Doing it once is luck. Doing it for a living means the next one dies and it’s yours. So I took the gate instead. The rotation, the headcount, the housing, the knowing where every man is at every hour. Prevention. The part I could actually do without gambling somebody’s life on my hands being steady.

Then I stood against a wall in a vet clinic on County 9 and watched a woman twenty-one years younger than me put a man back together with her voice level the whole time.

And the retractor locked in my grip.

Not because I was squeamish. I’d had my hands in worse. It locked because I looked into that wound and saw the one after this one, the one where the math comes out wrong and I feel it stop.

She took it out of my hand and gave it to Brazil and never said a word about it. Not then, not since. That’s the part I keep coming back to. She didn’t spare me. It just wasn’t worth her attention. She had a man open on a table and my failure was not a factor in the procedure.

Somebody moved downstairs. Refrigerator opened, closed. Bottle cap on the counter. Then nothing.

Her number was in my phone with no name on it.

She’d be awake.

Gunner’s folder was on the floor by the bed where I’d dropped it. Four sheets of copy paper. I’d read it twice, which I have never in my life needed to do with anything.

Take-home. The facility name. The amount, and the day of the month it cleared, and the fact that it had never once cleared late. Not much savings. Two cards, both close to the line.

So, I’d run her numbers instead of mine, because at least hers were solvable arithmetic. And there’s not one thing on those four pages I could fix.

I can put six men on her door. I can find the son of a bitch who put that round in Freak and turn him into a problem that solved itself. I can’t do anything at all about a woman in Jefferson City with a lanyard who is going to open a log, count to six, and be right.

My hand came halfway off the mattress toward that phone before I caught it and put it back down.

Twenty years of not reaching for things. You’d think a man would get better at it. He does not.

The digits went to three-thirty. I closed my eyes and lay there and didn’t sleep and didn’t call.

She was mine. I hadn’t earned one inch of it.

Chapter Eight